Gifted Mind
Entries in Gifted Women (1)
Gifted Education and Women
Catana
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Pursuing the ideas from the previous post, from a different perspective.
I just read a little book that started me thinking in quite a different way than the author intended. In Where Have All the Smart Women Gone? Alice Rowe discusses her study of 34 college-educated women. Most of them, as might be expected, were in traditional jobs—teacher, nurse, etc. The book deals primarily with feelings—self-esteem, disappointment in relation to their early expectations and plans for themselves, and ambivalence about choices that weren’t freely made. The book’s context is gender—the pressures on women to conform to certain roles, and all the other gender-based limitations that still exist in the 21st century.
But as I read, I started seeing the problems from a different perspective. Many of the complaints actually had nothing to do with gender. Gifted men (I think it’s safe to assume that smart women can usually be considered gifted) express the same thoughts. Rowe said that when the women in her study were young they “heard the message that they could do anything, but they weren’t necessarily given the skills to do it.”